Luther’s Doctrine of the Christian Life: Worship and Prayer
The Theology of Martin Luther
The Christian was indeed called into the situation of the congregation of the church. And the heart of the Christian’s calling in the church was listening to the Word and responding to it in worship. Faith has to respond, trust has to cling to its object, and it responds with a confession of who God is. That confession results in the sharing of the proclamation of the Word with others and for others; and it results in the praise of God.
For Luther, the understanding of human worship of God rested upon, of course, the first commandment. Worship is the opposite of idolatry. Worship in that sense is almost a synonym of trust. Trust cannot help itself, it has to issue into this public confession, which praises God.
In a sense, we could say that there is a double thrust to the reaction of faith, to faith bubbling over into words. Faith does so vertically in praise to God and horizontally in praise of God in front of other human beings. Faith simply recognizes God as worthy of trust and praise, and has to respond. The 20th-century scholar who dedicated much of his life to the understanding of Luther’s catechisms, Herbert Gergenzone [?], said that prayer is the original form of human language. Prayer and praise spring naturally from our very nature as creatures. Eden was filled with praise.
God elicits this worship from us, Luther taught, as He comes to us as our God, as our Father. His expression of love to us in the Word naturally draws forth from us a response of love that expresses itself in worship. Sinners, of course, are in flight from God. Sinners are afraid to come into the presence of God, and so the proper worship of God is not possible without God’s drawing sinners through Christ to Himself. Pagan worship, unbeliever’s worship, is a worship that is done not really in the presence and sight of God at all. It is done in the presence of an idol. It is done for the sake not of God but for the sinner’s sake, to appease the wrath of whatever god we might imagine, and thus to try to reconcile ourselves to God. But God has already reconciled us to Him in Christ, and true worship rests upon Jesus Christ and His act of
Dr. Robert A. Kolb, Ph.D.Experience: Professor of Systematic Theology
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reconciliation.
So Luther’s prime concern, when we think of worship and prayer, was always for God’s word, which makes our worship and our prayer possible. That’s why he understood the third commandment (keeping the Sabbath day) as a command to honor preaching and the Word of God. In the first petition, we pray, “Hallowed be Thy name,” and what does that really mean? Luther says. It really means that we make sure that His name is proclaimed properly so that people may respond by hallowing the name of God through their obedience to Him also in public worship. Worship is also, Luther teaches, our expression of our fellowship with God. Our expression of our fellowship with God in public worship stands at the very heart, at the intersecting heart, of the vertical and the horizontal relationship.
Everyone, every human creature, was created to give God praise; and all believers are called into the situation, the estate of the church, to gather together to give Him praise. God calls us all to be priests who serve in His temple, not leading public worship but praising Him, bringing the Word to others, bringing God’s love to others, and then returning to Him with prayer for them and praise of His name. Prayer and praise, therefore, cannot be a meritorious good work. Prayer and praise, according to Luther, are gifts of God.
He was still struggling against medieval views of worship, which were influenced by ancient pagan rhythms which reflected an animistic understanding of the relationship between God and human creatures. A good deal of the medieval practice of public worship had focused on human rituals as a means whereby human creatures can influence their power over God’s decisions. Human ritual can put a hammerlock on God, human prayers can force God’s hand, and human rituals can bring God to march according to human time. And Luther, of course, rejected this view completely. He returned to a view of prayer and praise, which emphasized that they were conversations with God; that was consistent with his view of the Word, his understanding of the response of the believer to that Word in faith.
We really can’t understand what Luther thought about public worship and about private devotion and prayer without looking, first of all, to the heart of the worship life of the medieval Christian, the Christian as Luther grew up. The heart of that worship was the Lord’s Supper, seen not so much as the Lord’s Supper but as the Mass, which the priest and the congregation in association with the priest celebrated. Again, it may well be true in the theology of the Mass that what the theologians taught was not as far from the Scriptures as what the common people believed. But Luther
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knew what the common people believed. He and other reformers who criticized the medieval practice of the Mass had grown up with what he considered misbelief about what happened in the Mass. So he rejected the Mass as a sacrifice of propitiation. He saw instead that God was the chief actor of the divine service. He saw the divine worship service as God serving His creatures, serving up His Word, serving them His Word through proclamation and through the sacraments so that they might be recreated as the children of God to worship Him.
Luther was in many ways in the practice of the church quite conservative. He redesigned the liturgical setting for public worship and praise, but altered it relatively little (at least in his first attempt to create an evangelical liturgy). That liturgy was called the Formula Missa. It remained in Latin, though it was fairly quickly translated into German. But it preserved the traditional parts, the Catholic form, of the liturgy which had informed Christian worship for centuries. It focused on the praise of God in the gloria. It focused on the plea for God’s mercy in every part of human life in the curia. It preserved the important confession of faith among the people of God in the creed. It celebrated the holiness of God in the sanctus. It came into the Lord’s presence in the sacrament, in the Lord’s Supper, by singing His praise as the Lamb of God. Luther reworked that canon of the Mass which emphasized the sacrificial theology of medieval understandings of the Lord’s Supper and focused on the words of institution. And Luther understood those words of institution as a proclamation from God to the people of God, the announcement of the forgiveness of sins that God was incorporating with His Word in the sacrament.
In 1523, Luther wrote the Formula Missa. Lutherans began to worship according to its form, not only in Latin but then very quickly in German. But in 1526, Luther also authored another form for the worship service, his so-called German Mass. He kept again the basic outline of the Catholic service, with gloria, with curia, with creed, with sanctus, and the other parts of the traditional liturgy; but in his German Mass he suggested that different hymns be used to express the function, to exercise the function of each one of these parts of the traditional order of the Mass. And thus, with vernacular hymns he made the Mass a more popular kind of worship service.
We dare not think of Luther’s giving form to public praise without thinking of his hymns. He was, of course, a master at the German language, and he expressed that mastery of the language not only in his translation of the Bible but also in the wonderful poetry he produced, which again captured the rhythm of the biblical
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message in the melody of the German language. He taught the German people to sing the praises of God themselves rather than merely to listen to monks or priests singing the praise for the congregation, though there was some public singing in worship in the Middle Ages. But he taught them not only to sing, he [also] taught them through singing. His hymns were rich expressions, not just of the praise of God but also of the Word of God. As the people sang these hymns, they learned the fundamental teachings of Luther’s message. The hymns functioned as catechisms as well. And Luther’s hymns were not just sung in church, they were taken into the streets. They were actually disruptive in the public marketplaces and the public squares of Germany. In more than one city, trouble broke out when Luther’s followers tried to sing the praise of God through the hymns that Luther had composed for them in public places outside the church.
If we return to the worship service, we notice that at its very heart for Luther, as a medieval Christian, stood Word and sacrament and Lord’s Supper. And Luther transformed his understanding of the Lord’s Supper and its place in the worship service from that of sacrifice to that of testament. What that meant for Luther was that it was not this human activity of re-presenting to God the sacrifice of Christ, but instead it was simply God speaking through the Lord’s Supper, understood as a testament. Luther believed that the approach to God with a re-presentation [correct? or representation?] of the sacrificed Christ focused on God’s wrath more than on His mercy. And it focused on human works rather than the divine. The priorities were all wrong in medieval worship. If we understand what happens in worship as God’s testament—God’s speaking to us His last will and testament—and then our response to that, we rightly understand what God is about in constructing the divine service, the service which God gives to us and then invites our response.
In this testament, God makes us His chosen people, His heirs. God gives us, first of all, Himself as the testator. In human flesh, our God has come to die. And in the Lord’s Supper He was preparing for His death; and, in giving it to us as a sacrament, He was setting up His last will. This testament is an act of love. All inheritances are unconditioned; they are totally products of grace. No one compels us to leave our fortune to them specifically. What we do with what is left after our death is completely a matter of our decision and not of the decision of other people. Perhaps the analogy breaks down; perhaps it’s not as good as Luther thought it was. It may well be that as we write our own last wills and testaments we think that certain people have deserved a share of our fortunes. In God’s case, He gave this testament as an unconditioned act of love. And the content of this testament, what is being given,
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is Jesus Christ Himself. The testator gives Himself. We are given a life that is His, an innocence, a righteousness that is His. This life will last forever; this innocence is ours forever. The Lord’s Supper involves one more instance of how God effects the joyous exchange. And He gathers us around Himself, present in the Lord’s Supper, as His heirs who receive His benefits, who profit from His giving, from His gift.
The result is that once again through preaching and through the sacraments, faith is aroused. The worship service is there, first of all, for God to act upon us and then for us to respond. And our response is also a gift from the Holy Spirit. It is also driven by the Spirit’s love for us. We respond not only in public worship, but we respond also in our prayers in public worship and as individuals and as families. Luther often stressed how important it was that families gather around the Word and that families pray together; and he wrote specific instructions for fathers and mothers to conduct family devotions. He wrote them even into his catechism where he provided suggestions for meditation and then forms of prayers (for his people to memorize since they couldn’t read prayers, many of them) for them to memorize so that they could begin each day and end each day and focus on the gifts of God at mealtimes through his instruction for prayer. Luther defined prayer in his Small Catechism as precious children chatting with, talking to, their father. He understood prayer as (to use his words) “the first exercise of faith,” and he recognized that true prayer to God the Father is possible only in Christ and through Christ, for it is God who teaches us how to pray. In the Large Catechism, Luther wrote, “God takes the initiative; He puts into our mouths the very words we are to pray.” [I wasn’t sure if all of this should be in quotes.]
Prayer was, above all for Luther, an expression then of our own dependence, our own need to rely on God. Prayer expressed our love for God as it flowed out of our faith and trust in Him. So the believer cries out in prayer, the believer finds refuge in God in prayer both with thanks and expressions of gratitude and with petitions, sometimes even with rather angry petitions, with an insistence that God hear us. Luther was utterly bold in prayer. Luther was like Job in prayer. He did not insist that God had to give him anything for this temporal life, but he rested on the promise of God; he pointed to the crucifix on his wall and said, “God, you promised,” when he was despairing over his sinfulness and wondering why God didn’t feel present. But in prayer, even when the feeling wasn’t there, Luther relied upon his God and insisted that God make Himself felt once again.
Luther taught that there is nothing too large for us to pray for,
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nothing too extravagant for us to pray for. It may not be good for us and God may tell us no, but there is nothing too large to pray for. At the same time, Luther insisted there is nothing too small to pray for. The God who watches when sparrows fall from roofs and who counts the very hairs on our heads wants us to talk to Him. As His dear children, He wants us to talk to Him about those kinds of things too. And so Luther says we so often shortchange ourselves and the loving Father, who wants to hear from His dear children. He wrote, “We are masters of that form of prayer which springs from bodily need or illness,” we can always pray when it hurts. “But we should find,” Luther went on, “the subject for our prayers in every corner of our lives and in the lives of others.” And he recommended particularly that we pray for our pastors and our teachers; we pray for government officials; we pray for our neighbors and their needs as we know them; we pray (he was referring here to the heads of households) to masters and mistresses; we pray for not only our children but also our servants (in our day and age we would say our employees or those for whom we exercise responsibility, as well as our superiors).
Luther did not believe that prayer was some kind of magic formula which made God come to time. [correct?] Prayer instead was the conversation of a child with a father, which places the self in the hands of God, in the will of God. Luther suggested that the fewer the words, the better the prayer; the more the words, the poorer the prayer. There is too much to pray for, for us to waste our time with a lot of repetition. Instead, we need to increase the number of needs we place before our God. He suggested in his exposition of the Lord’s Prayer that few words but richness of meaning is the way Christians pray. Pagans pray with a lot of words but relatively little meaning—tentative in their prayers on every temporal topic, tentative with hopes for every temporal blessing. Nonetheless, Christians are absolutely confident of the eternal promises of God, and also of His promise to be present in this day, in this life for us. So being tentative in our prayer means in no way that we are not confident that God wants the very best for us and will give us the very best. It simply means that we don’t trust our will, but gladly place ourselves in submission to His.
As he explains the Lord’s Prayer, Luther concedes [that] God doesn’t really need our prayer. God lets His name be hallowed and He lets His kingdom come and He lets His will be done, even without our prayer. But Luther repeats then this refrain: “This loving Father wants to hear from us, this loving Father enables us to pray so that we may draw the application of His goodness to ourselves.”
For Luther, prayer was not only directed to God, prayer was
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directed against Satan. Luther was quite insistent that prayer is not a means of grace, insofar as it is our coming to God. If we define prayer as meditation, which includes His coming to us in the Word, then it is a means of grace. But Luther understood the phrase “means of grace” as that which brings us God’s grace, and prayer is only a response to that. But in our responding to God as His loving children, in our recognition of His being our loving Father, we are fighting against Satan. Prayer has no power, God has the power, but in prayer we call down the power of God against the power of Satan. So in our prayers we fight Satan for ourselves, as we call upon God to strengthen our reliance on Him and our confidence in His power, as we call upon God to strengthen our ability to hear His Word and to flee to Him against the temptations of Satan. But prayer is also a weapon in our fight against Satan on the battlefield of the lives of those around us, for we call down the power of God against Satan for those whom we love, against his use of illness and every misfortune, against his temptation to doubt and to defiance of God, against every evil that may invade the lives of those around us.
Prayer to God and prayer against Satan is for Luther simply a gift of God. It is the groaning of the Spirit within us. The Spirit alone can lead us to prayer; He leads us to prayer through God’s command. It is part of the structure of our humanity, and God has insisted that we pray. But the Holy Spirit also leads us to prayer on the strength of God’s promise. He has promised to hear us as our loving Father, and that promise moves us to prayer. “We can’t resist the goodness of a God who says, ‘I want you to talk to me, I want to hear you,’ ” Luther remarks.
Luther recognized that prayer is, on the one hand, as easy as the inarticulate groaning of the despairing sinner who simply sends off a cry for help in God’s direction. But prayer, at the same time, is as difficult as the hardest struggle in human life. It is difficult because it does mean sacrificing the fleshly desire to rely on ourselves; it is difficult because there are so many diversions in human life. Luther took that very seriously, and the story is told that there was a friend in Wittenberg who boasted that he didn’t have any trouble praying. And Luther said that he would bet him a saddle for his horse that he did have difficulty in praying if he was really honest with himself. And this friend is alleged to have said, “Absolutely not. Let me just take the Lord’s Prayer as an example: ‘Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come . . .’ would the saddle also have stirrups?”
Luther knew from his own experience, and we’re talking here about somebody who supposedly prayed three hours a day—although I suspect he prayed a good deal more. Maybe less than
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three hours a day with hands folded, head bowed, but a good deal more because Luther was praying as he encountered all of God’s gifts all over human life. As he encountered those gifts, he also recognized the diversions, the meanderings of mind that diverted him. So for his hearers and his readers, he gave some specific suggestions. He suggested praying aloud, also privately, because praying aloud, he felt, would help concentrate the focus on the prayer. He suggested that prayer is best done when one is alone, when one can sneak off into a corner (although he did not mind praying to himself, as he walked the streets of Wittenberg and as he watched his children play on the floor in their home). Then, Luther suggested, “Let the words flow like a child.” That may stand in contradiction to his saying, “Be brief in your prayers,” but he knew that God wanted to hear the babble of His children. And yet Luther insisted on organized prayer. Because prayer is not a good work, Christians do not get extra points for prayers from the heart. Christians need the discipline of prayers already written out, so Luther prepared several books of prayer (or several revisions of his prayer books) so that people might read prayers in those moments when their thoughts were all dried up, but they wanted to turn to God. And yet, at the same time, he wanted words to flow like a child.
So he turned to the Lord’s Prayer, which would offer the prayer that we can pray when all the other words are gone, but which would also offer an agenda for praying in those moments when we are free to expand upon the thoughts of our prayer. For Luther, the Lord’s Prayer was not only an agenda for prayer; it was also an agenda for living. Each of the petitions, Luther found in his own experience, was an occasion for confessing the faith. Not only, according to Luther, did Christ teach His disciples how to pray in response to their request that He teach them how to pray, but He simply taught them. He taught them something of Christian doctrine. He taught them how to confess and what to confess, as He laid this agenda of prayer before them, to confess the holy name of God, to confess the coming of His kingdom, to confess the holiness of His will, to confess His providence in providing daily bread, and the like.
So each of the petitions also strengthen our faith as they remind us of what God does. But Luther did see the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer as requests, so he used them in his preaching and he used them as an important part of his catechism, teaching people how to pray as he taught them what God was doing.
God lets His name be hallowed even without our prayer, as we remarked a few moments ago, but here in the Lord’s Prayer we are praying that God may do His thing among us. What that meant
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for Luther is that we begin our prayer by praying for the presence of God in His Word. We pray that His Word may be taught in all its truth and all its purity; and if you pray for God’s Word to be taught in truth and purity, then you are also praying for the result of that teaching and preaching; you are also praying for lives that are lived in holiness according to it. And Luther was well aware, as he sketched the Lord’s Prayer as a battle cry against Satan as well, that when we pray, “hallowed be the name of God,” we are requesting from Him the power to resist everything that opposes His Word and our holy living.
Having prayed for the Word to come among us, we pray for His kingdom. The kingdom comes when the Father gives His Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit comes so that we may believe this Word that is proclaimed among us and lead a godly life according to it. Hang onto that godly life, Luther says, we pray, both here and in eternity. [Which part of the previous sentence should be in quotes?] In some ways, Luther prayed for the same thing when he prayed, “Hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come,” for in explaining both of these petitions he focuses on the Word and the life that inevitably flows from the Word.
And then the Christian turns to pray for the will of God, for the doing of the will of God. And Luther understood this petition in terms of God’s will that His name be hallowed and that His kingdom come. When we pray, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” we are praying, Luther taught, that God break and hinder every evil counsel which prevent the hallowing of His name, the coming of His kingdom in the proclamation of the Word and the living of a holy life. The will of the devil, the world, and the flesh prosper in this world unless God comes to reverse them. So when we pray, “Thy will be done,” we are praying against the devil, the world, and the flesh and their will.
Luther understood the prayer “for daily bread” in at least two different ways, as he interpreted it at different times in his life. At first he understood it as the spiritual bread talked about in John 6, Jesus Himself, but later he recognized that part and parcel of every human prayer must be, first of all, that concern for temporal blessings. Again, God gives these temporal blessings even without our prayer; He lets the rain fall and the sun shine also on the ungodly. But here we pray for the gift of gratitude, Luther says, in the context of receiving all the many blessings for which we ought to be thankful. And he included in that list of blessings food and clothing and shelter, good government and good neighbors, and all the rest that God bestows upon us in the course of daily life. When we pray for daily bread, Luther said in his later years, we pray for all it is that God wants to provide us with on a daily basis.
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Then we pray that our sins may be forgiven. Indeed, Christ has died for our sins, but we pray in this petition that our sins may not stand between us and our heavenly Father. To pray for the forgiveness of sins is to confess those sins. Here Luther teaches we confess before God in this prayer that we are not worthy of that for which we pray. “We daily sin much,” Luther says. “We daily earn God’s punishment and God’s wrath once again.” So we can only come, to use his dying words, as beggars, we can only come without any merit or worthiness on our part before our heavenly Father; we can only place ourselves at His mercy. But when we do that, Luther teaches, we pledge also to forgive. By God’s forgiveness, we are given the strength to forgive others. It just doesn’t pay, Luther would suggest, not to forgive others, for we have no need to hold their sins against them since our heavenly Father has not held our sins against us. So we pray also in this petition for the forgiveness of sins and for the grace to be able to forgive others.
“Lead us not into temptation,” the Lord taught. And Luther says, God, of course, tempts no one. But here we press God for protection from the deception that the father of lies, the devil, wants to work in our lives. Our own flesh deceives us, the world deceives us, Luther says. They want to seduce us into misbelief or unbelief, into despair and, he phrases it, “other great shame and vice.” But as we pray, “Lead us not into temptation,” we know what the story is; we know who has won the victory; we know where the power lies. And so as we pray, “Lead us not into temptation,” we are also announcing to the devil that the victory has been won, that whatever digressions he may induce us to make this day, the victory over him and all his temptations lies in our history, it lies as a part of our identity.
And then we pray, “Father, deliver us from all evils,” from every evil that might plague our lives, but particularly, Luther says, from that evil or the evil one as he oppresses us at the end of our lives. “ ‘Deliver us from evil’ or ‘Deliver us from the evil one’ is finally a prayer, Luther says, “for a blessed end for the gift of heaven.”
So we see that Luther brings us, as his students in his catechism, for instance, before the throne of our heavenly Father, before the throne of grace with utter confidence and with a song in our heart. Luther helped his people not only to pray but also to sing. He did that in a number of hymns, but he also did it in the great hymn, the Te Deum. The Te Deum, the ancient hymn of the church—which has traditionally been credited to Ambrose and Augustine though we know today that it was probably not composed simply by one author but by any number and assembled itself as the tradition grew—this great hymn was one of Luther’s favorites. And in 1529
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or thereabouts (the same year in which he commented on the Lord’s Prayer, as he was writing the catechism), he produced a new German translation of the Te Deum so that he could help his people sing this ancient hymn of the church: “Lord God, Thy praise we sing. Lord God, our thanks we bring. Father in eternity, all the world worships thee [he brings].” And he concludes, as Luther was wont to include: “Vouchsafe, O Lord, we humbly pray, to keep us safe from sin this day.” His concern comes through in this great prayer as well. “O Lord, have mercy on us all. Have mercy on us when we call. Let shine on us, O God, Thy face, our only hope is in Thy grace.” In praising God, Luther again flees for refuge to the provident God. “Our trust, O Lord, is all in Thee [he confesses at the end of his translation of the Te Deum], O let us never confounded be.”
In 1529, as well, he translated the litany of the church, that standard prayer which he also corrected in a Latin version. He had toyed with the idea of repairing the litany for some time. He loved it as a youth, and in 1519 he had expressed his approval of it, but he thought it needed repairs. It needed to be fixed up for evangelical use, particularly because of its prayers to the saints. In 1528, when the threat of the Turk loomed large on the horizon of western Europe, he advised people to turn to God and appeal for his temporal mercy in the litany. So, in 1529, he issued his corrected Latin version and his new German translation, and in both he omitted invocations of the saints, certain invocations for the pope and for the blessed departed, and he made a number of intercessions much more specific, as he prayed for blessings that he thought were particularly important for his people.
He implored God, in the words of his German translation of the litany, against the devil’s cunning and craft, against sudden and evil death, against pestilence and famine, war and bloodshed, against rebellion and discord, against hail and tempest, and above all, against everlasting death. All the concerns of this body and this life, as well as the spiritual concerns imposed upon us by our sinfulness and by Satan’s oppression, came before God is in the words which Luther gave his people. On the basis of Christ’s birth and suffering, His death and resurrection, His ascension and His promise of coming again at the last judgment for liberation, he taught his people to come before God and sing, “We poor sinners beseech thee, to rule and govern Thy church and preserve its bishops and pastors. To curb schism is in the church, to trample Satan under the church’s feet, and then to send faithful laborers into the harvest so that the weak and the distressed might be comforted.”
He also prayed for temporal peace and for those who were given
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charge over the temporal welfare of the people. For kings and all rulers, for every magistrate, and for the whole people, for expectant and nursing mothers, for the sick, for infants, for those is in jail, for widows and orphans. He prayed finally for God’s pity and mercy on all people, and for forgiveness for all enemies, persecutors and slanderers; and finally also for the fruits of the earth.
In praying the litany and teaching people to pray it, Luther was continuing to exercise his own calling as a proclaimer of the message of God, as one who confessed God’s greatness is in praise to Him and is in the instruction of His people.
